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Monthly Archives: June 2008

It’s a hot sultry day outside…thought I would give you a peek inside at the frame carving I am starting today. One of the new paintings for the Granary show is a horizontal of a life-sized fishing pole. It’s going inside this frame onto which I am preparing to carve a quote.

Step one is on the computer. I drew out an alphabet and scanned it into the computer. Then painstakingly separated and sized each letter. (Did this a while back so now all I have to do is copy and paste the letters needed, one at a time, and drag them into a blank graph page which I previously mocked up in Publisher. I use poplar finished boards in two sizes depending on the size of the painting. When the words are aligned, I lay them out in a separate file which has a mock-up of the actual frame size. This saves hours of what used to be hit or miss drawing of the letters directly onto the boards…erasing for spacing errors…and spelling errors, etc. When it all looks good and I have triple checked the spelling … I have Pat come and check it again. Check twice, carve once !

Then I tape the lines of words to the board and use a graphite carbon paper to trace them on. You can see my helper is at my feet every step of the way ! Out come the carving tools and a strong light at a raking angle to better see the edges…and away I go. Today I’m listening to Patrick O’Brian’s Post Captain and hearing about salty sailors rigging ships…great for hardy hand tool work.

So, now it’s 7pm and I’ve been at this since 8 this morning. Pat has just come over to call me home for supper. The hard part is done and when I started this blog page it was 5 and I expected to go back to carving…had some glitches and ….well there ya go.

As chance would have it, a magazine arrived today from my woodworking pal Peter,

Plimoth Life (he and his wife Maureen both work at Plimoth Plantation and are wicked cool humans to boot, if you haven’t checked it out already, you can link to his web site here www.peterfollansbee.com . It looks like they are both featured in a couple of articles which will make for good lunchtime reading tomorrow. I’ll post more of the carving as it progresses. Time for some shrimp pasta. What’s on your supper table tonight ?

Welcome ! With a nudge from Peter and a shove from Dov…I am now one with the way of the blog. Once I get the hang of it I plan to post musings from the studio, let readers follow paintings in progress, post art related information, pass along feedback from the website viewers and patrons, and along the way … open windows on this bright new world ! Stay tuned, HN

PS- I’ve just had the first ever siting of an Indigo Bunting in our yard !!!! Lunching on the mulberries just outside the studio window. Now that’s a harbinger worthy of this new beginning.